The new Jaquet Droz Grande Seconde Off-Centered Ivory Enamel (Ref. J006033200) automatic wrist watch is delivered in a finely crafted, albeit slightly oversized red gold body and features the most elegant hand-made dial that features rare (and very expensive, since the process cannot be automated) Grande Feu enameling, off-centered sub-dials forming figure eight and a nice mix of Roman and Arabic numerals.

The watch sports a rare “off-centered” design of its dial with its small seconds sub-dial located at 7 o’clock.

You can’t even call it “small seconds” since the display is even larger than the hours and minutes sub-dial, which is placed at 2 o’clock. Well, that’s why the watch has the “Grand Seconde” part in its name!

Another nice thing about this layout is that the axes of both sub-dials seem to form an isosceles triangle with the red gold setting crown, which is ergonomically placed at 4 o’clock.

As you can see on the photos, there is a nice twist to its overlapping sub-dials. Although featuring nine Roman numerals that are printed around the chapter ring, the smaller hours and minutes sub-dial has the numerals converted to Arabic ones in the sector where it overlaps with the “large seconds” display.

There is no info regarding its thickness, but, taking into account that both models share different versions of the same base movement, there is a good chance that this model will, too, belong to the range of ultra-thin automatic watches.

While many watchmakers resort to decreasing working frequency of their movements in order to provide them with more juice, Jaquet Droz solved the problem with a less popular double-barrel design. Despite beating at the usual frequency of 28,800 vibrations per hour, the caliber stores enough power for the watch to tick for almost three days (minimum 68 hours) in a row.

The caliber JD 2663A that powers the timepiece is, as usual, sourced from Blancpain that currently owns the former Frederic Piguet manufacture. Being essentially a seriously modified (and heavily re-decorated) version of the famous Caliber FP1150 (the same caliber, for example, animates the cute Blancpain Saint-Valentin 2013 Limited Edition wristwatch), the mechanism is very reliable and efficient offering you probably the best value for money ratio available in this niche. But, of course, however good the mechanism is, the retail price of $20,000 still seems a bit steep making this beautiful timekeeper a millionaire’s accessory of choice.